Chapter Four
Lucy
Waking up the next morning feels like slowly extracting a syrup-slathered screwdriver from her brain. Lucy’s tongue is sandpaper-dry and tastes like she’d been French-kissing a sewer grate. As she runs it over her mossy teeth, snippets of last night stumble forward: the bonfire’s sweet smoke, the fireworks, the sinful comfort of curling up under Patrick’s arm. And—oh, no. The bathroom floor, up close. The acidic burn of Scotch coming up the wrong way. His hands holding her hair back.
She doesn’t remember coming back up to the house or going to bed, but the pieces in between are embarrassingly clear. Slumped on the floor, sitting by the open toilet, she’d asked Patrick to take her back—or, no, not asked. Pleaded.
“You’re my husband. You love me. You’re here . What’s the problem?” she’d asked, tripping past a few consonants and vowels.
Several times.
“Let’s talk about this tomorrow, okay?” he’d said.
Tomorrow’s here. He’s gone.
Downstairs, Vivian is at the kitchen table, sipping from the old mug with the fading, outdated New York skyline. On her phone, there’s a photo of Hank with toddler Vivian on a wintry city sidewalk lined with elegant brownstones. He still had a dark crest of JFK Jr. hair. They’re in parkas. Snowflakes dot Vivian’s lashes, and a sled trails behind them. Hank bought Lucy a sled for Christmas when she was eight, but nature wasn’t on her side that winter. The snow didn’t line up with his short, sporadic winter visits. They’ve never sledded together, and now they never will. It still sits in Dawn’s garage, collecting dust.
Vivian flips her phone over, looking irritatingly awake. Her hair is twisted and clipped up, with tendrils spilling out just so. Whenever Lucy tries to do her hair like that, she looks like a mom in the school pickup line.
“Morning.”
The word reverberates painfully in Lucy’s skull. “Hi.”
She fills the kettle and peels one of the bananas Paige brought for her yesterday.
“The fireworks were nice,” Vivian says.
Lucy barely remembers them. “Yeah. You and Caleb seemed to get along pretty well.”
Vivian nods. “He’s a nice guy.”
“Are you into him?”
It’s a bold question—too bold—but Vivian is probably going to sell the house out from under Lucy tomorrow and then they’ll never see each other again. She might as well ask.
Vivian gives one sharp ha . “I’m in a relationship.”
“It seemed like you were hitting it off.”
“We didn’t want to get in the way of you and Patrick catching up.”
“Mmm. Thoughtful.”
Vivian keeps prying. “So, you’re separated, but he came over anyway?”
“I didn’t invite him.”
“Which one of you ended things?”
Lucy can’t really say if they’re even over. The details from last night are fuzzy, but she remembers feeling peaceful in his arms. He was tender with her. He cared.
“That’s a very personal question, Vivian,” she snaps.
She flinches and holds up her hands. “I’m sorry.”
Lucy goes upstairs to find aspirin for her pounding head. She pads past her unmade bed, then stops short when she sees two plump, stuffed garbage bags leaning against her dad’s bedroom closet.
“Hey, what’s this?” she calls, wary.
“What’s what?”
“The trash.”
Downstairs, there’s the scrape of a chair over linoleum, then footsteps on stairs. “I’ve been cleaning,” Vivian says, equally wary, as if she knows this could cause a fight.
Lucy kneels to untie one black plastic bag. Panic rises in her chest as she sifts through the soft mess inside, a jumble of clothes and swim trunks.
“You’re getting rid of his things?” she asks, alarmed.
Lucy spills the bag’s contents onto the sand-colored carpet. She reaches for a forest green sweatshirt with Foxy Roxy’s logo on the back and its name embroidered in front. The inner layer of fleece has worn down to nearly nothing over the years, and the cuffs are frayed. She remembers wearing this when she was five or six years old—or, no, maybe she’s just seen that photo of herself in it so many times, she can’t tell where memory ends and imagination begins. There aren’t many pictures of her with Hank from her early childhood since other people were rarely around to take them. But that summer, her dad had gotten a fancy digital camera with a self-timer. One afternoon, Lucy borrowed the sweatshirt to warm up after a cold swim. It fell to her knees. They must have propped up the camera on the coffee table. The timer went off as they both were scrambling back to the couch with silly smiles, zero poise, a natural kind of ease. She hadn’t had to try back then.
“It’s old junk,” Vivian says. “Half of it was falling apart twenty years ago.”
Lucy clutches the sweatshirt to her chest. “You can’t throw all this out.”
Vivian picks up an errant sock. “This is sentimental?”
“It’s not about the sock.”
Lucy scoops up armfuls of clothing and heaves them back into the closet. It’s not wrong to want to keep pieces of him alive, intact, and on his own property.
“Lucy…” Vivian sighs. “You can’t fight this forever.”
She whips around. Her headache boomerangs with her. “You don’t get to have the final say on everything! We’re not getting rid of all this.”
“It can’t just sit here.”
“You can’t throw it all out because you’re mad he didn’t tell you about me!” Lucy says, a little more shrilly than she’d like. “He just died, can’t you respect that?”
“Respect?” Vivian echoes in disbelief. There’s an unsettling edge to her voice, and her dark eyes glint with emotion. “Yeah, let’s talk about that. If he had respect for any of us, we wouldn’t even be in this situation. He wouldn’t have lied straight to my face for my entire life, and he wouldn’t have made a fool of my mom. And if he respected you, he would’ve done more than just play house together for a few weeks a year.”
That does it.
“It. Is. July,” Lucy says, shaking with anger. “I am being generous by letting you stay here during my month. You might have had more time with him, but you know what? If you actually loved him, you wouldn’t be able to stomach throwing all this away.”
Vivian shuts down. “I’m not doing this,” she mutters.
She walks away, leaving Lucy with a blinding headache and a whole wardrobe of old clothes.
Vivian
Vivian needs to get away from Lucy. Far away. Down at the dock, she straddles the Jet Ski and zooms away. With a squeeze of her hand, she rockets to fifty miles per hour. She takes wide, arcing curves, leaning far enough to one side for the thrill of centrifugal force to kick in. She drives in circles, bouncing over the ripples from her own wake. She’s still too angry to breathe properly.
If Lucy wants to cling to ratty T-shirts, fine, let her. She can take all of them if she cares so much. What rattles Vivian is that Lucy got close enough to the truth. When she overheard that damning phone call all those years ago, it was like the first snag in a sweater. She could’ve sewn it up—confronted him or let it go. Instead, she took note of every single one of Hank’s infractions and watched the wool unravel.
There were the standard poor-little-rich-girl complaints: He was always working late, pecking out emails on his BlackBerry during family vacations in Aruba, skipping her AP Art show for a business trip, whatever. (It occurs to her now—maybe there was no business trip. Lucy probably graduated from high school the same week.) And look, Vivian wouldn’t want to be married to Celeste, either, but he made that choice. If he couldn’t give his wife his full respect, Vivian felt he ought to have let her go. She could probably find someone else. So could he. Instead, Celeste contorted herself to make him happy and always came up short.
Beyond that, he never seemed proud of Vivian, not when her art portfolio earned a notoriously difficult five out of five points, not when she landed that coveted internship at Gagosian, not when she graduated with honors. “Of course you did,” he’d say. “If you didn’t, I should call up Calhoun and ask for my money back.” She often heard him quip to others, “I spent a quarter mil for NYU and she’s a bartender.” (She was not. She was one of the youngest certified master sommeliers in the country.) Anytime she pushed back against him, he’d take off his glasses and pinch the bridge of his nose, saying, “You don’t know how much I wish my parents were alive so I could argue with them like this.” He already saw her as a disappointment—selling the house would be just another black mark against her. What’s one more?
Vivian wishes she could’ve loved him. He just made it so damn hard.
She is motoring around to nowhere in particular, half-heartedly taking in the rustic scenery, when her phone buzzes in the glove compartment. She comes to an abrupt stop. It’s Oscar. Her chest tightens.
“Hi,” she breathes into the phone.
“Is this a good time?”
A snarky response pinballs out before she can catch it. “I don’t know, is this finally a good time for you ?”
“I’m so sorry I haven’t been able to talk sooner. I hate that I haven’t been there for you,” he says guiltily.
“You should.”
“I know. Things have been…” He sighs. “Carla’s been…You know what, don’t worry about Carla. It’s just been hard to get away, that’s all.”
Vivian realizes she’s digging her nails into her thigh and clenching her jaw. She tries to relax.
“I miss you,” she says. Her tone balances on a tightrope between tender and accusatory.
“I miss you, too. How are you doing? What’s going on up there?”
She describes the past three strained days, leaving out Caleb.
“I’m trying to get the house ready, but Lucy had a meltdown when I tried to throw out his old socks.”
She’s exaggerating and she knows it isn’t fair, but venting feels good. She waits for his response.
“…Oscar?” She checks her phone. The call is still connected. “Oscar?”
She hears him a beat later. “You there?” he asks.
“Ugh, the service is bad out here.”
“Where are you?”
“In the middle of the lake. I needed space from her.”
“You keep cutting out.”
She groans. “Hold on a sec. Don’t hang up, okay?” She secures her phone in the compartment and zooms a quarter mile west. Lifting it back to her ear, she asks, “Better?”
“We’ll see. When are you coming back? I miss you.”
She savors the sound of that. “As soon as I can. But I don’t know when that’s going to be. What’s happening at the restaurant?”
He fills her in on the recent petty melodramas: The newbie waiter tripped over a woman’s emotional support Pomeranian and dropped an entire tray of entrées. An influencer shut down the restroom for forty-five minutes to stage a full-on photo shoot sitting on the green marble sink. It was a star-studded week: Kristen Stewart, LeBron James, Congressman Bennett Garcia and his wife, the fashion stylist Edie Meyer.
“Let me guess, Kristen ordered a pét-nat.”
“Bingo.”
Vivian is so good at her job. She misses it, misses him—though she can’t tell where one stops and the other starts. She misses feeling talented and desired and at home. As Frank Sinatra famously sang about New York, if you can make it here, you can make it anywhere. But why would you want to?
There’s a beat of silence.
“Oscar?”
Nothing. She hangs up, then tries him again.
“Hello?”
“Hi. You sound fuzzy.”
She bangs her fist against the handlebar and groans.
“Let’s talk later, okay? I have to go anyway.”
Now that she’s finally gotten him on the phone, she’s greedy for more. She doesn’t want it to end.
“Okay, have a good day,” she says morosely.
“You, too—I mean it.”
He hangs up first. Vivian stows her phone away and presses her hands over her face. She loathes that this is so hard. The good news is that she only has to hang on for so long. As soon as she sells the house, everything will change. It has to.
Vivian tentatively creeps back into the house. “Hello?” Early-afternoon light slants through the living room, casting dramatic shadows. “Lucy?”
No response. Thank God.
Upstairs, she sees Lucy put Hank’s closet back together again. Fine. Vivian won’t antagonize her by undoing her work—though she notices the green sweatshirt is gone, and she’d bet a whole paycheck that it’s stuffed away in the bedroom Lucy’s been hogging.
Instead, she works on the kitchen, scraping dried-up pens and bent paper clips out of the junk drawer, deep-cleaning the baseboards, and doing her best to fix the sagging blinds. Eventually, she needs a break. She gets in the truck and drives, hoping her hunch pans out.
Walking into Foxy Roxy’s is like stumbling across the set of a feel-good movie about a small, scrappy town. Half the cars in the parking lot bear bumper stickers with the pub’s name and logo, stamped “Circa 1971.” The wooden floors are well-trodden, creaking in hot spots like outside the ladies’ room and smack-dab center in front of the bar. By the dartboard, there’s a group of graying men, undoubtedly buddies from the glory days of their high school’s hockey team. It’s not chic—the bar stools are made of vinyl that’s seen better days, and the menu is printed in Comic Sans—but why should this place be stylish? It’d be boring if every restaurant across America were the same. People need places like Foxy Roxy’s a whole lot more than they need upscale dining. Without low-key joints like these, Della wouldn’t be as special.
The place hasn’t changed. As she’d hoped, Caleb is behind the bar. Vivian’s glad her luck has taken a turn for the better.
“She returns,” Caleb says, smiling as she approaches.
He nods toward an empty stool away from the crowd. (It’s lunchtime, but during the summer, the pub has six happy hours a day starting at noon.)
“What are the chances you’ve got some vinho verde back there?”
The Portuguese wine is tart and light, like a crisp Granny Smith apple; it’s one of her favorites for hot weather.
“Is that wine?”
“Yes.”
“Does this look like the kind of place that’d carry a vinho verde?”
She sighs. “No.”
Running a finger across the tap handles, he says, “I could try sizing you up the way you did for me last night.”
She smirks. “Try me.”
“Hmmm.”
Pursing his lips, he scans his options and fingers the lever for Shipyard’s Summer Ale. As he slides the glass across the dark, scratched, burnished wood of the bar, a memory pops up: Vivian herself sliding across this very surface with Caleb’s hands bracketing her hips. She drops her gaze to the trembling surface tension of the pint and sips down the foam.
“I don’t have any speech prepared about why you should drink this in particular,” Caleb says. “But I think it’s delicious, and if you disagree, the replacement’s on the house.”
“It’s good. Refreshing. I needed this.”
“You have a whole fancy license for your expertise in drinks, and the best you can come up with is ‘Good, refreshing’?”
She has no clue how to deal with grief or Lucy, but this? Bantering with men in bars? This, she can do.
She flips her hair. “Oh, I’m sorry . The earthy mouthfeel of the hops is quite elevated by the honeysuckle and amber and—”
“Okay, okay, you can stop showing off now,” he says, grinning.
“I actually don’t know anything about beer. I made that up,” she confesses.
“I’ll call the New York State Bar Association, have you reported as a fraud.”
“I think that’s for lawyers.”
“Good, you’ll probably need one.”
“You’d really turn me in?”
He pretends to consider this. “It’d be more fun to go on the run together.”
“I’m sure Lucy would love for me to disappear. She would’ve pushed me into the bonfire last night if she could.”
The comment lands with a thud. Caleb grimaces.
“I’m sorry, I shouldn’t drag you into that,” she says.
“It’s okay.”
She peers down into her glass. “It’s really not.”
He hesitates. “I don’t know if I should say this…”
She’s instantly intrigued. “Say it.”
He bites his lip, then exhales. “Okay.” Dropping his voice, he continues, “She doesn’t hate you. She really wanted to meet you. You have no idea, she used to look you up, talk about what it’d be like if you could be closer…The circumstances are horrible, but I think eventually she’ll want to be friends.”
Vivian’s breath goes shallow. She’s hanging on his every word but refuses to let him see how much this means to her.
“Friends.” She sips her beer, crosses her legs, and tucks away her feelings. She’s had enough practice at that. “Well, we’ll see.”
He nods. “She’s cool. Just give her a chance.”
There’s a beat of silence. “And she and my dad were…close? The way she talks about him, you’d think he was a saint. He wasn’t—at least not around me.”
“She loved him,” Caleb says. “I mean, he was her dad.”
Right. Of course.
“He was never, I don’t know, condescending? Difficult? Distant?”
It’s embarrassing, putting this out there. But she needs to know.
He sighs. “It’s not my place to judge.”
She raises one eyebrow. “But?”
His mouth twitches in sympathy. “Well, he always dropped in for the summer and a few weekends, but…being a parent should involve more than that, shouldn’t it?”
Vivian wants to hear more, but a surly waitress—forty-something and freckled with a row of silver hoops climbing the curve of her left ear—slaps an order slip down in front of Caleb.
“Feeling chatty, are we?” she asks.
Vivian covers for him. “He was recommending a few of your specials.”
“Yeah, I’ll bet he was,” she scoffs.
“That’s Robyn. I’ll win her over someday, I swear,” he says once she leaves. Tapping the slip of paper, he deadpans, “These are my favorite customers. See those three girls at the table in the middle?”
She takes a subtle peek. One is watching Vivian and Caleb closely, and the other two are doing a bad job of pretending to pore over the menu they’ve no doubt seen eight hundred times already.
“Yeah.”
“Jenny, Kayla, and Brooke. We all went to school together. Biggest blabbermouths in town.”
Sure enough, when he delivers the drinks, one of the women grabs his wrist. Vivian strains to listen in.
“Is that the girl?” Her eyes widen with intrigue as she chews her gum.
“I don’t have a clue what you’re talking about,” he says, extricating his arm.
“Yeah, and I don’t have a clue what you and my sister did behind our shed after junior prom,” she retorts as he walks away.
Caleb groans. “I’m sorry if you heard that,” he says to Vivian.
With a prickling sensation along the back of her neck, she realizes she can sense people watching her. Not just the Gossip Girls, but from every corner of the room. She stiffens, not wanting to give anyone the satisfaction of turning around.
“Word travels fast around here, huh?”
Caleb glares at the three women. “And it’s about to travel even faster.”
Indignant heat rises to her cheeks. Over the past two years, Vivian has often wondered how hellish it’d be to be the subject of the rumor mill. She’s lucky to have avoided it for as long as she did.
“So, you were saying…?” she prompts.
He sighs. “I could never say this to Luce, but she deserved a better dad than the one she got. I mean, anyone would.”
Vivian is relieved. If Hank really were an angel around Lucy, surely her best friend would back that up. He can’t.
Vivian finishes her drink. “Thank you for saying that. Seriously.”
“Want another?” he asks.
“Not if I have to drive back.” She never has to consider these things at home; she always walks or takes the subway. She slides a twenty to him—more than enough to cover the pint and a generous tip. “This was nice. Thanks for listening.”
He looks like he wishes she’d stay. “Come around anytime.”
She hitches her purse over her shoulder, starts toward the door, then turns back. “I should’ve done this years ago,” she says, scrawling her number on a napkin.
Caleb bites back a grin. “I’ll text you mine.”